Tag Archive for declassification

Two senior Capitol Hill Republicans plan to introduce a congressional resolution calling for full disclosure of all U.S. government’s records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

“I want to make sure that the information that is owed the American people is made available,” the veteran North Carolina conservative said in an exclusive interview with AlterNet. “The American people are sick and tired of not being given the truth. “

David Phillips was a failed actor turned expatriate newspaper publisher in Santiago, Chile when he was recruited into the CIA in the early 1950s. He made his mark fast. In 1955, he won a Distinguished Intelligence Medal, one of the agency’s highest honors, for mounting deceptive radio broadcasts in the CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954.

After that his CIA career took off. With Howard Hunt, Phillips served as propaganda chief in the CIA’s failed effort to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs In April 1961. When he was assigned to Mexico City in 1962, station chief Win Scott described him as “the finest covert action officer I have ever met.”

After JFK’s assassination, Scott was not so complimentary and I suspect the reason why was Oswald’s curious handling of Oswald. .(I tell the story in my biography of Scott, Our Man in Mexico. Buy it here.)

This open letter was delivered to the Obama White House last week. We will post the response as soon as we get one.

In an open letter to the White House, a diverse group of JFK authors and investigators are calling on the president’s lawyer to endorse complete declassification of thousands of pages of still-secret government records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

“First thoughts: An unrelenting campaign to educate the public about the critical importance of October 2017. If the release of information is not acceptable we must demand a new top-to-bottom investigation of the assassination, with a particular focus on the political issues of the day.”

Now available on You Tube retired Major General Fabian Escalante, former head and current historian of Cuba’s State Security Department,i gives a sneak preview of his upcoming book Beyond Any Reasonable Doubt. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Aggression Against Cuba.Read more

Letting the National Archives and Open Gov know how they can improve public access to government records can have a real effect. The Archives is already mobilizing for the October 2017 JFK releases because people demanded, via the Internet, that they act. More people said JFK records were the top declassification priority–and NARA responded.

The documents were collected by the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent agency created by the JFK Records Act, which has previously released thousands of documents about Kennedy’s assassination. They should be released by October 2017 as per the JFK Records Act unless the next President decides they should remain classified.